Recently, digital broadcast for transmitting image data and music data as digital data has come into notice and is becoming popularly used. An advantage of the digital satellite broadcast is that a signal of high quality durable to noise and fading in comparison with a signal of the existing analog broadcast can be transmitted on the same transmission line. Also, the frequency use efficiency is improved, thus realizing multi-channel transmission. For example, in the digital satellite broadcast, hundreds of channels can be secured by one satellite. In such digital satellite broadcast, a number of dedicated channels for sports, movies, music, news and the like are prepared, and programs of dedicated contents are broadcast in these dedicated channels.
Among these dedicated channels, the music channel is one of the popular channels. In the music channel, a promotion program for introducing new songs and hit songs is broadcast.
As described above, in the conventional music channel, the program for introducing new songs and hit songs is transmitted by dynamic images and sounds. When a viewer watches such a program of the music channel and finds a favorite tune, the viewer may wish to buy and enjoy a CD of the introduced tune. Also, the viewer may wish to know information about the artist of the tune and information about an album including that tune. Therefore, if possible, it is very convenient that the viewer can immediately obtain the information about the artist of the tune and the information about the album including that tune when watching the music program, or that the viewer can down-load audio data of the favorite tune when it is found.
However, with the conventional music channel, dynamic images and sounds of the tune are sent in a one-sided manner and the above-described demands cannot be met.
Thus, to solve such a problem, there is disclosed a music contents distribution system which makes it possible to easily obtain information about the music being broadcast in the music channel and to easily down-load the tune data to a data storage device, in the specification and drawings of the PCT application PCT/JP98/0544 (filed on Nov. 10, 1998).